Musings of a Software Development Manager

Working with my pair yesterday we ran into an issue testing a view that pulled in several partials. In the interest of making progress we punted after about half an hour of trying to setup expectations on the partials and just tested the negative cases where we didn’t have to worry about the partials being [...]

My first break of the CI build on a new team came about two weeks into starting the new job. We had made a small change to a dynamically created URL on a single page of the application. Normally this would fall into the category of “too simple to test” for me. My pairing partner [...]

My daughter spent an hour the other day cutting holes, drawing red bricks, and pasting grass along the bottom of a simple cardboard box. It’s a common story among parents, especially of small children that despite spending a lot of money on a gift, the kid ends up enjoying the box and ignoring the toy. [...]

My default rule with mocking is to try to stick to stubs where possible. I don’t enjoy having to setup and verify interactions with mocks, but sometimes you have some code where that’s exactly what you need to do. I’ve used many frameworks in Java over the years from EasyMock to Mockito, but I was [...]

On a recent project I ran into issues with testing controllers in Grails. Starting test first, I spent some early time figuring out how much support there was out of the box for unit testing Grails domain classes and controllers. I setup Spock as a plugin and plunged in. I was dealing with a legacy [...]

Typically development groups fall into one of two patterns: Shared development database – every developer shares a single centralized development database often managed by a DBA group. Desktop databases – every developer has an individual instance of the database. The practice has evolved over time and developers tend to follow precedence on it. Historically, developers [...]

I gave a presentation on Spock a very nice BDD framework in Groovy a few months back to our Groovy Users Group in Sacramento. After using it on a real world Grails project the last few months it has grown on me to become my go to testing framework for Groovy/Grails or Java projects. A [...]

Over the past few months I’ve been working on some remote projects as a solo developer. Knowing I wanted a light weight tracking tool I took some time to experiment with a few tools and I’ve recently come to appreciate the lightweight character of AgileZen. Despite many warnings to use the simplest thing that could [...]

Everyone relishes the confidence of a having a backup plan if everything falls apart. For myself as a manager it was knowing I could always go back to development if something unexpected came up. After 10 years as a development manager, I got the unfortunate call to follow my director to an unannounced meeting first [...]

As a new manager recruiting for the first time you’ll find HR will usually provide you with a job description template. You’ll read it, laugh at how generic it is, and then try to do a bit of modification. That’s a futile effort. (Though depending on the organization you may have to leave pretty close [...]